Plot
The McCallister family prepares to spend Christmas in Miami, Florida. Ten-year-old Kevin, Peter and Kate's youngest son, sees Florida as contradictory to what he thinks an appropriate Christmas environment is, particularly noting the lack of Christmas trees. During the school Christmas concert, Kevin's older brother Buzz humiliates him during his solo, causing Kevin to retaliate. Kevin refuses to apologize for his actions, and, still angry with the family's decision to go to Florida, he storms up to the third floor bedroom of the house, where he wishes that he had his own money so he could go on his own vacation. During the night, Peter unknowingly resets the alarm clock and causes the family to oversleep. Meanwhile, a piece of newspaper is blown into the house's main door, revealing that The Wet Bandits, Harry Lyme and Marv Merchants, have escaped from detainment. In the confusion and rush to reach the airport on time, Kevin gets onto a flight to New York City while loading his Talkboy with new batteries and the family does not realize it until after they land in Florida. Meanwhile, in New York, Kevin tours the city and uses the Talkboy to check into the Plaza Hotel. However, he finds himself scared by the appearance of a woman tending to pigeons in Central Park.
On Christmas Eve, Kevin tours the city in a limousine and visits Duncan's Toy Chest, where he meets the store's philanthropic owner, Mr. Duncan. There, Kevin discovers the proceeds from Christmas sales will be donated to a children's hospital. Mr. Duncan allows him to take a pair of ceramic turtledoves as a gift, instructing him to give one to another person as a sign of eternal friendship. After running into the Wet Bandits, Kevin is chased to the hotel. Mr. Hector, the hotel concierge, confronts Kevin about the credit card, which came up as being stolen. Kevin flees, but is captured by the Wet Bandits. They discuss plans for robbing Duncan's Toy Chest that night, before Kevin flees in the back of a hansom cab.
In Florida, the McCallisters discover that Kevin has been found using Peter's credit card in New York. The family flies to New York and Kate desperately tries to find Kevin. Having noted earlier that his uncle Rob has a townhouse in New York, Kevin attempts to visit him. He successfully reaches the location but finds the house vacant and undergoing renovations and that his uncle and his family are in Paris. In Central Park, he comes across the pigeon lady. However, when Kevin gets his foot caught while attempting to run away, she frees him. While watching a local orchestra perform from a musical instruments storage room above Carnegie Hall, Kevin learns how her life has fallen apart and how she dealt with it by taking care of the pigeons in the park. Kevin vows to the pigeon lady that he will be her friend.
After leaving the hall, Kevin heads to the townhouse and sets up various booby traps inside it. Kevin arrives at the toy store during Harry and Marv's break in, throws a brick tied with a note to Mr. Duncan through the window to set off the store's alarm, and is chased into the townhouse. After the two spring every trap in the house, Kevin flees to a phone booth and dials 9-1-1. The Wet Bandits catch Kevin when he slips on a patch of ice and take him to Central Park. The pigeon lady incapacitates the bandits with birdseed and Kevin sets off fireworks he had bought earlier to signal the police. Shortly after, Harry and Marv are arrested. At the toy store, Mr. Duncan finds Kevin's note and realizes his role in stopping the robbery.
Kate comes across two police officers in Times Square, and remembers Kevin's fondness for Christmas trees. Kevin makes a wish at the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. There, he sees Kate and the two of them meet and reconcile. A truckload of gifts from the toy store arrives at the hotel the next morning as a reward to the McCallisters. Kevin and Buzz have a moment of reconciliation and Buzz allows him to open up the first present. Kevin goes to Central Park to give the pigeon lady a turtledove to reaffirm their friendship. At the hotel, Cedric delivers Kevin's room service bill, totaling $967.43, to Buzz. Peter interrupts Kevin by calling out, "Kevin, you spent $967 on room service?", at which point he runs off and the film ends.
Read more about this topic: Home Alone 2: Lost In New York
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)